Pornhub's Sunset Strip Billboard Sends a Message

LOS ANGELES—After having its Times Square billboard removed after only two days by the hotel on which it had been affixed, adult porn tube Pornhub moved the same ad 3,000 miles to the West Coast, where it found a home on more accepting Sunset Boulevard, right next to the famous Carney's railroad car. The billboard was quietly painted over this weekend, but for the two weeks it was up it apparently got the attention it was seeking.  According to the Los Angeles Times, "The racy new billboard on the Sunset Strip raised both eyebrows and questions that restaurant owner John Wolfe wasn't comfortable answering." Wolfe told the paper that one young diner asked him, "What the heck are they thinking putting that thing up there?" Nor was Wolfe particularly pleased with the situation, telling the paper, "You walk up my ramp, and the billboard stares straight at you. If you're going to do something like that, put it in a strip club. ... Kids were asking their parents about it." Really? Kids were asking their parents why the hands were shaped like a heart? Of course, there was no actual nudity or "bad words" on the billboard, just that pesky word, porn, which is presumably what Wolfe wanted relegated to strip clubs, though why is unclear since strip clubs are in a totally different business from porn. But we get his drift. Despite L.A.'s long experience dealing with billboards featuring a vast array of businesses and products, including for strip clubs and sugar daddy websites, large centrally placed commercials ads flaunting actual porn are rare, if not unknown. In fact, one movie producer quoted by the Times expressed surprise at seeing the billboard from his car, proving that even jaded Hollywood execs can still be shocked by something other than gross receipts. "Had I not been in a hurry, I would have totally stopped for a photo," said filmmaker Joshua Caldwell, who added that porn "used to be this hidden thing no one really talked about. ... It certainly made me do a double take." But no matter how upset some people may be about a billboard ostensibly promoting porn, there is little they can do about it as far as getting local government to take it down. The Times queried the city, which replied that no formal complaints had been received about the Pornhub billboard, and that in any case the city has no control over the content of billboards. Do you hear that, porn industry? The city of Los Angeles has no control over the content of billboards! But someone does. The Times also called Regency Outdoor Advertising, which owns the billboard, for comment, but the call was not returned. However, after the billboard was painted over Monday, the impression was left that Regency had relented and taken it down. But Pornhub told the Times that the billboard was only supposed to be in that location for two weeks anyway, and that the two weeks had been "long enough to get its message across." That message, according to Pornhub VP Corey Price, delivered via the image of two hands in the shape of a heart, along with the inspirational words, "All You Need is Hand," is intended to promote adult entertainment "into the mainstream consciousness and away from what most people conceive as being a taboo subject." Or as Price put it in an email to the Times, "It's not something to be ashamed of." That said, no one can know for sure if the message of love, acceptance and fapping was received as intended by the people who saw the billboard, but it is interesting to compare the Times' somewhat muted coverage of the story after the fact to the LA Weekly's more exaggerated (tongue in cheek?) reaction on Halloween, soon after the ad went up: "Why Is There a Huge Masturbation Billboard Over Sunset Blvd?" The answer, according to reporter Dennis Romero, is that unlike New York, Los Angeles is "a big, cosmopolitan town," and thus more accepting of ads promoting commercial sex work and porn. While that may seem like a stretch, it's clear that a new day has dawned, and the specter of a billboard promoting porn is no longer the inciteful act it once may have been, even if people in general still see it as being out of the ordinary, which it still is. Image: The Pornhub Sunset Boulevard billboard before its removal this weekend.